'South Carolina Is So Gay'

State tourism officials insisted that they had known nothing about the campaign. But when the promotion was first announced last month, the tourism board said in a statement that "it sends a powerful positive message."

"For our gay visitors, it is actually quite wonderful for them to discover just how much South Carolina has to offer — from stunning plantation homes to miles of wide sandy beaches," the statement said.

The agency reversed course last week after many South Carolinians disagreed.

Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative activist group in Columbia, the state capital, said that at first he thought the ads were an Internet hoax.

"I think with today's economy, we have to be really smart with our tourism dollars, and South Carolina's market, very clearly, is the family-friendly market," Smith said. "So if we want to spend our dollars in a way that's wise, we need to go after our market, and our market is families."

Said Ventphis Stafford of Charleston: "We're so gay? Nah. Wrong state. Go to California."

Activist: Right message, wrong place
Gay tourism is a $64.5 billion market in the United States, the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association estimates, and more than 75 cities around the world have gay-themed campaigns that create no controversy. But the campaign drew special attention in South Carolina because it emerged only weeks after widespread debate over gay rights in the schools.

Eddie Walker, principal of Irmo High School, in suburban Columbia, announced that he was quitting rather than approve the creation of a Gay-Straight Alliance at the school, one of the state's largest.

"Our sex education curriculum is abstinence based," Walker wrote in a letter to the school. "I feel the formation of a Gay/Straight Alliance Club at Irmo High School implies that students joining the club will have chosen to or will choose to engage in sexual activity with members of the same sex, opposite sex, or members of both sexes."

Such attitudes remain prevalent in the state, said Warren Redman-Gress, executive director of the South Carolina Alliance for Full Acceptance, a gay and lesbian advocacy group. He praised the motives behind the campaign but criticized it as poorly thought out.

"I wish the folks at the tourism board had done a little more of their homework," Redman-Gress said. "I get calls regularly, people want to know before I come and spend my hard-earned money, my souvenir dollars in South Carolina, is it a place where it is OK for me to be gay?